The traditional graphic design method involves three steps: exploration of the design concepts, review of the initial ideas, and refinement of the selected concept to make the final design product. While the exploration and the review processes rely heavily on graphic designers, the refinement method can be automated using computer systems.
In the exploration stage, the graphic designer needs to understand the purpose of the design (e.g., what is the design for) and the context of the design (e.g., where and how is the design going to be displayed). The designer further needs to collect the content of the design, including text and images, and generate multiple design concepts, using sketches, in order to create a design or a design product. The final design product is usually a composite image having a particular page layout. A graphic designer produces one or more initial page layout concepts for the content using established design principles and past experience. The initial page layouts are then evaluated by other graphic designers and/or customers. Finally, a single page layout is selected from the initial page layouts. The selected layout is refined by arranging and applying styles to the text and image content to produce the final composite image, referred to as a final page layout or layout.
There are existing computer aided design systems arranged for generating a professional looking page layout in the refinement stage. Many of these systems are template based. That is, templates designed by the graphic designers are provided to the computer system. Users set their content in the placeholders defined in the template with some flexibility to change colours or fonts.
Some more sophisticated design software programs perform an automatic layout method using constraint-based optimisation techniques. The automatic layout method starts with a layout template and content is filled in the placeholders of the template. The layout is then refined on the basis of satisfying every predetermined constraint. The focus of the automatic layout methods is to optimise the refinement method of the initial page layout.
Other systems are available that are directed to generating an initial page layout. Some of these systems allow users to select a template; others automatically suggest a template from user's requirements. Since a layout template is authored without knowing the external environment context of the new layout design, the resulted designs could be inadequate. For example, a composite image page's background of which is formed by a red colour may be inappropriate because the wall where the image will be displayed is red. In this instance, the wall is considered to define the external environment context of the composite image and its page layout. In some of the systems, after a layout has been generated, colours used in the layout can be adapted to some aspects of the environment context. However, these available systems are ineffective and lack flexibility. One such automatic layout system generates composite images depending on the display context, e.g. display device size. For example, the layout generated for an HTML page that is to be displayed on a computer monitor, is different from the layout generated for displaying on a mobile phone screen. However, visual context (i.e., external visual features associated with the page layout to be designed) is not considered in creating the page layout.